Pages

Interactive: This Is How Much Money Twitter Owes You! http://ti.me/1bexvAZ @Time #TwitterOwesMe #Twitter

How Much Does Twitter Owe Me?

Want to know if your Twitter feed produces enough value to retire?

Enter your username to find out? Enter the username of any public account to measure its share of Twitter's fortune.

Not enough to retire, huh? Don’t despair, even Barack Obama is getting his clock cleaned online. The leader of the free world is owed $5,160,650, but he’s a small-timer compared with 19-year-old pop star Justin Bieber, who is due $20,916,384 thanks to his nonstop tweeting and devoted following.

To see how we came up with those numbers, check the fine print.

Methodology

In its IPO paperwork filed to regulators last month, Twitter stated its 230 million active users are producing 500 million tweets per day, noting, “We deliver more than 200 billion Tweets per day to our users.”

Twitter appears to define a “delivered tweet” as any tweet seen by a follower of another user. If the 200 billion figure is to be believed, then each of the 500 million daily tweets is delivered to an average of 400 people.

A $24.9 billion value divided by 200 billion tweet deliveries a day comes out to 12.45 cents per daily eyeball on the site.

We know how many times per day a person tweets on average. We also know how large each user’s audience is. That audience may not be the world’s most engaged. At least one study suggests that around three-quarters of tweets are ignored. To estimate a user’s current number of daily readers, we reduce the potential audience by 75%.

The size of this daily audience times 12.45 cents gives you your share of the Twitter largesse.

Of course, the largest hole in this estimate is that the value of Twitter reflects not its current user base but its potential to grow. So go ahead and give back about half of your earnings — if you’re feeling honest.